I saw these at Future Shop a couple of days ago, beside the Rock Band and Guitar Hero packages. You too can have rock star hair for a mere $19.99 (in Canadian dollars)!
Tag: Games
Interview with Chris Slemp, MSDN
Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.
Click here to watch the video.
“Grim Fandango’s” Puzzle Document
If you’re looking to get into the mind of a game designer and the design of one of the most highly-regarded computer adventures games, be sure to check out the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document. Tim Schafer, in “a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia,” decided to put the game’s puzzle design document online in PDF form (it’s 2.3MB in size).
Here’s a great summary of the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document, written by Andy Geers:
I use that word "crafted" because that’s exactly what this newly released document shows: true craftsmanship. We see the incredible attention to detail, the pacing of the narrative as it builds and as the puzzles get increasingly sophisticated, always coaxing the player along with them. As somebody whose spent the last few years trying to write my own adventure game, what struck me most about this document is the sheer simplicity of it – it’s well established that it takes a great deal of clarity and hard work to boil down something so vast as Grim Fandango into such a simple representation that conveys so much information in such a succinct way.
It’s a considerably more interesting read than most specs.
My Job-Related Reading List
Nothing gives you that frozen-caveman-thawed-in-modern-times feeling like returning to a software platform after not developing in it in seven years. Getting back into the swing of Microsoft’s development tools has been fun so far, but it is, as a lot of people have told me, like drinking from the firehose.
To quickly get acclimated with C#, ASP.NET and XNA, I’m expensing the following books I bought today:
- Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen
- Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader
- Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming by Alexandre Santos Lobao, Bruno Pereira Evangelista, and Jose Antonio Leal de Farias
I’ll let you know what I think of these books as I read them.
“Zero Punctuation” Reviews
And finally, a couple of reviews from my all-time favourite game reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. The first one’s for Saints Row 2, which includes a great argument for why it might actually be a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV as well as a brilliant concept for a new game:
and here’s the latest review, for Dead Space, which he summarizes as “competent but bland”. Luckily, his review is anything but…
Oh, how I enjoy Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s game reviews in his video series Zero Punctuation. In this installment, he covers (and savages) Will Wright’s long-awaited game, Spore. Thankfully, he skips complaining about the DRM, which I heard plenty about already. After hearing his review, DRM sounds like the least of the game’s problems…
Some of my coworkers at b5 were all hot-and-bothered about the demo for the XBox 360 game Too Human, so I decided to download it and give it a try. I played it and was generally less than impressed with both the gameplay and especially the storyline (like Assassin’s Creed, the story’s a rather clumsy mish-mash of swords-and-sorcery and sci-fi genres).
Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the fast-trash-talking host of the excellent videogame review show Zero Punctuation agrees with me. He panned the game in his trademark fashion:
Categories
Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)
Can you identify the ’80s-era games depicted in Scott Campbell’s piece, Great Showdowns (of the 8-bit Era)?
Categories
XBox on a REALLY Big Screen
Here’s something for gamers who want to go big: the Cineplex chain of movie theatres in Canada is renting out downtime at 29 of its locations to people who want to play XBox 360 games on their giants screens. CDN$179 (US$169) gets you and 11 of your friends 2 hours’ worth of big screen time.
Here’s an excerpt from the CBC article:
Theatres will generally have about 12 to 24 hours of available downtime a week, mostly in the morning, she said. Many theatres are in “full grind” right now showing summer movies, but they should slow down and have more available time once school begins in September.
Theatres may also stay open late into the evening to accommodate groups, at the discretion of each manager.
“If they wanted to book a four-hour window, we could certainly go later in the evening,” [Pat Marshall, Cineplex’s vice-president of communications] said. “If the theatre manager has the staffing, they could go till two in the morning.”
The wife is a big Rock Band aficionado. Maybe I could book something for her birthday…
A sign that I may have woken up in a parallel universe: Paramount Pictures has snapped up the rights to make a film — tentatively titled Atari — about the life of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the title role.